Fullers, Tuesday 6th December, 5:30pm: Dr Michael Powell book launch, Musquito
Lindsay Tuffin*
Dr Michael Powell is no stranger to controversy. The Tasmanian Times was the first to take up what became a national controversy when then Bass parliamentarian Andrew Nikolic tried to have Michael disciplined by the University because he criticised Nikolic in a letter to the Examiner. The University obliged by refusing to renew Michael’s teaching contract.
It is appropriate then that now Michael has published a book on the Aboriginal resistance figure Musquito who fought on the NSW frontier and then in Tasmania. He was captured and hanged in Hobart in 1825.
Again Michael has entered controversy with a fresh view of Aboriginal resistance both in NSW and Tasmania. In Sydney he provides new revelations on the importance of American Indian foods in sustaining resistance but also the importance of disease in muting resistance.
He reveals new research that indicates genetic vulnerability to disease in Aboriginal people, a highly contentious argument, but one that means the decimation of Sydney Aborigines was far greater than the record indicates and makes more remarkable the level of resistance on the Sydney frontier. He poses a serious re-examination of this aspect of contact history.
He also strongly suggests that Aboriginal resistance both in NSW and Tasmania was as much religious and apocalyptic as it was simple warfare and draws on the North American experience to illustrate the comparison.
In Tasmania Michael details the demographics to show that Musquito was able to muster formidable Aboriginal mobs to concentrate attacks on white settlement and waged a brutal terror campaign that made him notorious. While Musquito was able to forge a pan-Aboriginal alliance against white intrusion and was of catalytic importance in precipitating the Black War, he was really an historical accident of time and place.
Michael demonstrates that it was the demographic explosive of white settlement, not just disease or violence that really caused the collapse of Tasmanian Aboriginal society and allowed the charismatic Musquito to assume such a formidable organisational role. The capture of Musquito led to an Aboriginal delegation to parley a peace but as always the British misunderstood and missed an historical opportunity.
While a powerful figure Musquito does not take away from the astonishing war of Tasmanian resistance that lasted from his death to the final capitulation of the Tasmanians to exile and white control. Michael Powell has written a fascinating new insight into this period of Tasmanian history that breaks new ground in understanding.
This book will be launched by Prof Henry Reynolds at Fullers Bookshop Hobart on Tuesday 6th December at 5:30.
*Lindsay Tuffin has been a journo for nearly five decades, mainly in Aus (and mainly in Tassie), and Pomland …